I love the high country of Colorado—and in a less effusive manner, so does Dan Peterson. Partly for your enjoyment and partly for our own, this booklet represents the crystallization of our mutual enthusiasms. We hope that it will serve as a useful guide for you and others who thrill to the heights and diverse grandeur of our Colorado Rockies.

But first, a word of warning: if after reading this booklet, you add one act of vandalism, or carelessly cast one burning cigarette to the winds, or messily leave a beer can in a crystal creek bed, the whole purpose of our publication has been defeated. We have written about ghost towns out of love of their dramatic past and a reverence for their present fragility. If you follow in our footsteps to these mountain spots, we entreat you to go in the same spirit.

When I said this booklet represented a “crystallization” of our mutual enthusiasms, I could not have spoken more truly. Dan is still “hurting,” as he phrases it, because Gladstone, his favorite ghost town, had to be left out due to limitations of space. In order to appease his hurt, I have agreed that he can sneak in its location on the Silverton map and a short paragraph of description in the text.

And what have I had to sacrifice? Too many pets, such as Beartown, reminder of the brave history of Stony and Hunchback Passes; Mineral Point and its lonely sentinel, the San Juan Chief shaft house still perched across a fork of Poughkeepsie Gulch and seen as one jeeps up to thrilling Engineer Pass, and Mayday, where I have never been but am intrigued by its romantic sound.

Our booklet does offer you forty-two “ghost towns” in photograph and story, plus passing mention on a map or in the text of a few others. These forty-two are reached from twenty-two attractive mountain towns where it is possible to obtain good accommodations. All but three of our final choices may be visited by ordinary car. For Lulu City, you will have to walk a three-mile trail or ride a horse; for Bachelor, you may take your car most of the way but will have to walk the last mile or jeep the whole distance, and for Carson, you will have to go by jeep or horse from Lake City. For the most part our forty-two towns are easy to see and in their separate ways unique.

Here, another word of warning: there are almost no ghost towns any more. In the true sense of the word they are gone. If you had been able to ride a horse or were willing to punish your Model T Ford, I could have taken you in the 1920’s to dozens of true ghost towns no farther away than along the Front Range. Even in the late 1940’s, when jeeps first came in, I could still have guided you to many true ghost towns. But no more.

What has happened? Tourists (a mixed blessing) and natives who have no regard for Colorado’s appealing past, have stolen from them, vandalized them, destroyed buildings, and carted whole towns away. Another killer in the form of fierce high-country winters has levelled them under tons of heavy white snow or pulled them apart with snatching, tearing wind. Whether desecrated by humans or eroded by nature, I am constantly reminded of Charles Kingsley’s lines, painted on the Tabor Grand Theatre curtain:

In other cases the ghost towns have undergone a metamorphosis. Some settlements have changed into summer resorts because of the charm of their buildings or the picturesqueness of their settings. Sometimes their ghost town status was lost by a new industry moving in, such as the sawmill at Lenado; or a new motor road has been strategically built, such as the Peak-to-Peak Highway which redeemed Ward. These towns, although peopled only by ghosts for many years, once again throb with life today. Many of the summer-resort group are alive only in the warm months. When the aspens have lost their fluttering gold in the autumn, they return to ghost towns.

We have included some of each type. All were true ghost towns once, and all had ghostly reminders still extant in 1960. But if you, as you visit them, should fail to leave everything as you find it, there will soon be nothing left for anyone to see. A sad and forlorn example of what can happen in only a short time is the formerly beautiful Lee House at Capitol City. When I first saw it in 1955, the house was still a true mansion, and its atmosphere eerily evoked the great and pretentious dreams of its builder. But in 1960 despoiling tourists had changed it to a horrid ruin.

So go forth in the true spirit of adventure to see and to enjoy, and may this little book add to your enjoyment!

A plan for touring the whole state and a large folded-in map of Colorado serve as introduction to the special towns and separate tours that follow. On the large map, the towns suggested for starting points are shown as black dots and are numbered to correspond with the numbers of the individual tours. The ghost towns appear as red dots. On the smaller maps the starting points are shown as squares, and the ghost towns as solid circles. Dan has drawn them all with the double purpose of being accurate and helpfully clear.

But however clear the plan and maps, real enjoyment in visiting these sites can only be had if the viewer has adequate knowledge of the people who built these towns and the times they lived in. Before setting out on the trips recommended here, some general knowledge of the state’s history is a must. To this end no quicker method exists than a reading of Colorful Colorado, a good companion volume.

The photographs, employed throughout the present booklet as illustrations, carry credit lines which should be plain to all except where initials have been used. DKP stands for Daniel K. Peterson; CHS, for Colorado Historical Society, and DPL, for the Western History Collection of the Denver Public Library.

My own part in the production of this work needs no explanation. My first visit to a ghost town was in 1904 when, as a toddler, I was carried on horseback by my father to Alice (then a thriving little spot). Alice was my father’s headquarters for building a reservoir system from five high mountain lakes that emptied into a sixth. These lakes (one, Lake Caroline) lie some four to six miles beyond Alice.

Since that distant day I have never ceased to travel to Colorado’s mountain towns, and I frequently describe myself as a “hillbilly.” No matter where I have been, it has always been the mountains of faraway lands that have had the greatest drawing power for me—the Jotunheim range of Norway, the Highlands of Scotland, the Alps in France and Switzerland, the Apennines in Italy and the Himalayas in India.

Yes, I can say along with Keats:

THE ALICE POST OFFICE STILL STANDS